雙語(yǔ)+MP3|美國(guó)學(xué)生藝術(shù)史51 郵票上的雕像

 
托瓦森去世時(shí)，用大部分遺產(chǎn)在哥本哈斯建立了一家藝術(shù)博物館。他的主要作品都珍藏在這家博物館。雕刻家自己就葬在博物館的庭院里。 

51 ON A POSTAGE STAMP郵票上的雕像
 
WHEN I was a boy I collected postage stamps. Now I’m grown up, but I still have the stamps I collected and I still like to get new ones to put in my album. 
If you collect stamps I’m sure you have at least one with a side view, or profile, of George Washington’s head. This side view of Washington’s head was first used on postage stamps in 1851. It has been used on almost every issue of ordinary United States postage stamps since then. Sometimes it has been a three-cent stamp, sometimes a two-cent, and sometimes a one-cent stamp that has had this Washington head on it. 
All these profile pictures on stamps were made from a bust of Washington. The bust was made from Washington himself at Mount Vernon. It was made by a sculptor who was an expert at making busts that looked like the real people. 
This expert was a Frenchman named Jean Antoine Houdon (Oo-donh). You can tell he was a Frenchman just by seeing his name. Houdon was one of the best sculptors France had had for two hundred years. When he was a boy he studied art in Paris and when he was twenty he won a prize for sculpture. The prize gave him enough money to study art in Italy for four years, so he went to Italy. He liked Italy and stayed there ten years instead of four. Then he came back to France. 
Houdon said he believed a sculptor should try to make true likenesses of men who had brought glory and honor to their country so that people would always know what these men looked like. Houdon became just as successful at making portrait statues as the Romans had been. Some people think he was even better than the Romans. The most famous statue Houdon made was of a French writer named Voltaire. Voltaire is shown seated in a chair. 
Have you ever wondered why so many statues have eyes without pupils? I knew a boy who went through a picture book of sculpture and with a pen put pupils in the eyes of all the statues. He said he didn’t like statues with blank eyes. 
One reason the eyes are blank is because the sculptor tried to make the exact shape of the eyes. As you know, there isn’t any hole in the outside material of a real eyeball and so the sculptor felt it would not be right to make a hole in the statue’s eyeball. If a sculptor wanted to show the iris (the colored part) and the pupil (the black center) he painted them on the eyes or put glass or crystal eyeballs in the statue. Carving the eyes without pupils was good sculpture, but it did make the eyes look blank. Michelangelo very lightly carved a circle and dot on his David’s eyes, but most of his other statues have blank eyes. 
Now, Houdon thought, just as you probably do, that a portrait statue ought to have eyes with iris and pupil. So Houdon invented a way of his own for doing this. He made a deep hole for the pupil and made the iris in relief. He also left some of the marble for the white part of the eye a little raised so as to catch the light. Houdon’s scheme worked very well. His portrait busts look very much alive. Some of the busts even seem to have a twinkle in their eyes. 
When Benjamin Franklin was in France he had his portrait bust made by Houdon. Franklin liked the bust of himself so much that he asked Houdon to come to the new United States to make a statue of George Washington. It took Houdon and Franklin almost two months to sail from France to America and that was a fast trip in 1785. Some of the side views of Franklin on our postage stamps have been taken from Houdon’s bust of Franklin. 
Houdon went to Mount Vernon and stayed with Washington until he had made the bust that the postage stamp is copied from. This bust has never left Mount Vernon and you can still see it when you visit the home of Washington. Then Houdon made a full-length marble statue of Washington which is now in the Capitol at Richmond, Virginia. Here is a picture of it. 
 
No.51　GEORGE WASHINGTON（《喬治·華盛頓》））　　　　　　　　　　　HOUDON（烏敦　制） 
Courtesy of The U University Prints 
Besides busts of Voltaire, Franklin, and Washington, Houdon made busts of John Paul Jones, Thomas Jefferson, Lafayette, and many other people—men, women, and children. 
And now, even if you are not a stamp collector, you know more about the portrait on one stamp than many stamp collectors know.